For the past decade, the popularity of IEEE 802.3 (Ethernet) networking technology and its technique for transmitting data signals over unshielded twisted pair wiring (UTP) has been the key driver defining cable performance parameters. This technology, however, was originally designed to allow transmission rates of 10 Megabits per second. During the early 1990s, the Ethernet networking technology was expanded to speeds of 100 Megabits per second over UTP.
Today, with the popularity of Internet and more powerful application software, users are demanding more bandwidth from their local area network (LAN). In order to meet such demands, a networking platform for 1000 Megabits per second transmission has been developed.
However, because the same basic principals that were proposed for operation at 10 Mbps were followed for production of the 1000 Mbps platform, this new design has become extremely complex and expensive. The new design has also become highly sensitive to cable parameters such as return loss, attenuation, crosstalk, ACR, delay skew, far end crosstalk and impedance.
To overcome these problems, new networking platforms and standards are being developed to be backwards-compatible with existing Ethernet systems. Systems incorporating these new standards employ a new transmission technology making them more robust while using less complex circuitry, yielding a more economical solution. The transmission technology used by these new systems is Pseudo Emitter Coupled Logic (PECL).
One system that utilizes the above-mentioned PECL transmission technology employs a high impedance output load along with PECL to produce a low power signal that makes the system virtually immune to near-end crosstalk or far-end crosstalk. However, because the system employs a low power input signal, it is extremely sensitive to attenuation and input impedance smoothness. The system also uses a low level encoding scheme, making it necessary for the nyquist (carrier) frequency to exceed 100 MHz. The actual nyquist frequency in the WideBand 1 Gb per second system is 167 MHz.
In light of the deficiencies of systems described above, along with their associated wiring technology, it is desirable to provide a simple and relatively inexpensive low loss data cable. It is also desirable to provide a low loss data cable that can be used in data networking systems, the data cable being less sensitive to cable parameters such as return loss, attenuation, crosstalk, ACR, delay skew, far end crosstalk and impedance, relative to the existing data cables.
Cabling standards organizations and developers seem to focus on developing products to enhance Ethernet and do not appear to be concerned about open architecture. Thus, it is desirable to incorporate a design of true open architecture, thereby providing maximum available bandwidth for all systems operations. This is necessary, given the fact that Ethernet technology was originally designed based on transmission rates of 10 Mbps and has already been pushed upward by a factor of 100 times. As a result, it is only a matter of time before a new high speed networking technology platform will have to be established to achieve improved data rates and effectively network high speed terabit operating equipment.